There was a prophetic conversation in the hours leading up to the IUPUI Jaguars' 2003 Mid-Continent Conference tournament championship game against Valparaiso, with the program vying for its first NCAA tournament appearance.

Matt Crenshaw and Odell Bradley talked about heroics.

"Just give me the ball and I'm gonna win it for us," Bradley told his point guard before the game at Kemper Arena in Kansas City. They were talking about the possibility of needing a late shot against a Valparaiso team that had bested the Jaguars by 17 points per game in the previous four meetings.

Crenshaw retaliated.

"Man, if the game's late and it's close … I ain't passin' it. I'm gonna shoot it."

Just three years prior, IUPUI was in its Division I infancy, having made the jump from NAIA for the 1998-99 season. Because of a two-year waiting period once entering the Division I level, this was only the third season that IUPUI was eligible to compete in the NCAA tournament.

So few gave IUPUI a chance against Valparaiso because they simply didn't even know who the Jaguars were. The awkwardly phrased Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis opened in 1969. The school, affectionately called "Ooey-Pooey" in those days, was living in the shadows of in-state schools Indiana, Purdue and Butler.

Head coach Ron Hunter, then in his ninth season at IUPUI, was familiar with guiding a team from NAIA to Division I. He helped do it as an assistant coach at Wisconsin-Milwaukee from 1987 to 1993.

Then there was Crenshaw, who in 2000 was serving the last of his six years in the Navy. He was an old man at 26 when he arrived at IUPUI.

"I wasn't trying to be anyone's father, either," said Crenshaw, who has been an assistant coach at IUPUI since the 2006-07 season.

Crenshaw says he would jokingly get compared to Chris Weinke, who was 25 years old when he joined the Florida State football team in 1997 and won the Heisman Trophy in 2000.

That age and experience allowed Crenshaw to be IUPUI's torchbearer.

"If you conduct yourself the right way and lead by example first," he said, "people will follow you."

Crenshaw wasn't typically one to assert himself offensively—he scored 8.1 points per game that season—but he was IUPUI's undisputed leader.

"I've coached a lot of guys over 30 years," said Hunter, now the head coach at Georgia State, "and Matt's probably one of the most special guys I've ever coached."
In this same game the year before, the Jaguars got blasted by 33 points against Valparaiso. That year, Crenshaw said, some players were just "happy to get to the finals, but not expecting to get there." Some didn't even bring enough clothes for the whole trip.

Here they were again. "Our goal was to get to the NCAA tournament," said Crenshaw. "It's something we talked about at the end of the season the year before."

Instead of facing a 21-point deficit at halftime like the year prior, IUPUI took a 30-28 lead into the locker room.

During a timeout with 6:40 to play, up 55-52, Hunter, who was mic'd up for TV, reinforced the stakes.

"You are three stops away from going to the NCAA tournament!"

The Jaguars got those three stops, plus one more, and built a 63-56 lead with 1:22 to play.

But Valparaiso scored six of the game's next seven points to cut the deficit to two. With the ball and the lead, the Jaguars could have drawn a foul to put the game on ice with two free throws.

Instead, Mullins turned the ball over with 15 seconds to play, and Valparaiso used the break to tie the game at 64.

During a timeout with 10 seconds to go, Hunter decided not to draw up a play, instead trusting Crenshaw, the oldest player in Division I, to make the right decision.

So as Crenshaw dribbled the ball down the court in a tie game with 10, 9, 8, 7 seconds to play, there wasn't much to think about.

"I just felt at peace coming down the court," said Crenshaw, who prayed earlier in the day to his grandmother who had passed away during his freshman year. He asked for calmness, and he got it.
Crenshaw drove to the right. When no Valparaiso defender responded, all Crenshaw had to do was lift up from 12 feet out to connect on the most consequential shot in IUPUI's program history and give the Jaguars a 66-64 lead.

"He stepped up in the moment," said Josh Mullins, a senior on that team. "That was Crenshaw. When things needed to be done … he was our leader. We followed him."

Valparaiso had one second to attempt a desperation heave, but Mullins picked off the pass at half court to make up for his earlier turnover.

The buzzer sounded, Mullins threw the ball into the air, and Ooey-Pooey punched its ticket.

Still in its infancy, IUPUI had emerged onto the college basketball scene with its first trip to the NCAA tournament. It remains the program's only appearance. Crenshaw's shot allowed IUPUI to climb out of the crib of Division I basketball and into a new realm of accomplishment.

Eight days after returning home from Kansas City, IUPUI, after spending much of its existence not even in the same galaxy as Division I basketball, played its first NCAA tournament game as a No. 16 seed against Kentucky at Nashville.

Despite losing to Kentucky, the sense of accomplishment has not left Hunter 14 years later.

"It's really amazing how quickly it happened from when we turned Division I," said Hunter, who still has IUPUI gear hanging in his house in Georgia. "That was one thing that we were really proud of, and how quickly we were able to go from a school that no one had ever heard of to a school that was in the NCAA tournament."